AURORA Horizon project: Earlier warnings, clearer choices for Boreal cities

AURORA is a new Horizon Europe project that turns climate and health data into practical tools city teams can use every day. The goal is to help local authorities spot risks sooner and act faster when threats like extreme heat, poor air quality, flooding, or disease outbreaks start to rise. The project focuses on Northern Europe’s Boreal region, where rapidly changing seasons and coastal weather patterns create unique public health challenges for communities.

What AURORA Will Deliver

Over the next 42 months, AURORA’s 26 partners are building a ready-to-use toolkit for local authorities and health services. This toolkit will include a Climate & Health Observatory, advanced forecasting and scenario modeling tools, an early-warning system, and an AI-assisted decision support platform that ranks response actions by their impact and feasibility. The toolkit’s architecture pulls together EU, national, and local data, and it is being co-developed with end users through an “Implementation Hub” to ensure the tools meet real-world needs.

Where It Happens

The AURORA tools will be demonstrated in five pilot cities—Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Tampere, and Pori. These cities will showcase how the system works in practice. The results will then be replicated in three additional municipalities—Klaipėda, Joniškis, and Jūrmala—to encourage wider adoption of successful solutions across the region.

Coordinator, Partners, Dates and Budget

AURORA is coordinated by EXUS AI LABS (Greece) and brings together 26 partner organizations—including universities, research institutes, city authorities, public-health agencies, SMEs, and other public bodies—from 11 countries. The project officially launched on 1 September 2024, with a kick-off meeting on 9–10 October 2024 in Kaunas, Lithuania. It runs through 29 February 2028. The total project budget is €7.21 million (with €6.10 million funded by the EU). Laurea University of Applied Sciences is one of the partners, with its involvement spanning the full project period.

Laurea’s Role: From Principles to Practice

Laurea University of Applied Sciences plays a key role in making AURORA’s tools trusted, usable, and ready to adopt across different city contexts by focusing on three main areas:

• Leading ethics and legal oversight: Laurea heads the project’s ethics and legal compliance work. It ensures that data use is proportionate and transparent, and that anyone participating in AURORA workshops or studies does so with informed consent. Laurea also steers an “ethics-by-design” approach throughout the project, embedding ethical principles into every stage of tool development.
• Contributing to co-creation: Laurea helps organize and facilitate hands-on sessions (through the consortium’s Implementation Hub) where practitioners and residents co-create the solutions. These workshops allow local experts and community members to shape requirements and test prototypes, ensuring the tools fit real city workflows from day one.
• Turning results into reuse: Laurea works on packaging the project’s proven solutions into easy-to-use playbooks, training modules, and templates. By documenting what works in the demo cities and creating training materials, Laurea makes it easier for other municipalities to learn from AURORA and implement the tools and practices themselves.

Laurea also shares insights and lessons learned through its own channels, such as the Laurea Journal, including articles that discuss the ethical best practices developed in AURORA.

What This Means for Cities

When extreme weather or health threats hit, minutes matter. With clearer forecasts and earlier alerts, city and health teams can prepare staff and resources in advance, target outreach to vulnerable residents, coordinate more quickly across departments, and clearly explain their decisions to leaders and the public. In short, AURORA’s outcome is better-prepared cities that can respond more effectively to climate-related health emergencies.

The AURORA toolkit is designed to support city and health teams by enabling them to:

• View integrated climate-health indicators in one place. All key data will be accessible through a single Observatory, giving teams a shared, up-to-date picture of local climate and health conditions.
• Explore forecasts and run “what if” scenarios. Using Scenario Modelling tools, officials can project future conditions and test how different interventions might play out, improving long-term planning.
• Receive timely alerts for emerging threats. An Early Warning system will send alerts whenever locally defined thresholds (for example, a heat index or air quality level) are crossed, so agencies can mobilize early.
• Evaluate and choose the best responses. An AI-assisted Decision Support platform will suggest and rank response options—such as opening cooling centers or issuing health advisories—based on expected impact, feasibility, and cost, helping decision-makers choose actions with confidence.

Built for Trust

AURORA aims to improve preparedness without collecting unnecessary personal data. Most of its tools rely on aggregated statistics or publicly available information rather than sensitive individual data. In cases where the project involves people (for example, in co-creation workshops or pilot studies), participation is strictly voluntary with clear, written consent. By prioritizing privacy and transparency from the start, the project seeks to deliver effective solutions that cities can adopt with confidence and public trust.

What Success Looks Like by Project End

By the end of the project, AURORA expects to achieve:

• A shared, city-ready picture of climate-health risks in Boreal settings. Cities and health services will have common dashboards and data that highlight their climate-related health vulnerabilities and hotspots.
• Earlier warnings and clearer decisions during fast-changing events. Municipal teams will receive warnings sooner and have decision support tools to act swiftly and explain their choices, even as conditions evolve rapidly.
• Trained teams equipped with playbooks and drills. City staff will have been trained through simulations and provided with playbooks, drill exercises, and templates so they can continuously improve their emergency responses.
• A network of municipalities ready to reuse and scale what works. Beyond the pilot and follower cities, many other municipalities in the region (and across Europe) will be aware of AURORA’s solutions and prepared to implement the proven tools and practices, creating a wider community of climate-resilient cities.

AURORA Project at a Glance

• Project period (Laurea’s involvement): 1 September 2024 – 29 February 2028
• Duration & partners: 42 months; 26 partners from 11 countries
• Budget: €7.21 million total (€6.10 million EU contribution)
• Coordinator: EXUS AI LABS (Greece)
• Demo cities: Riga (Latvia); Tallinn (Estonia); Vilnius (Lithuania); Tampere, Pori (Finland)
• Replication cities: Klaipėda (Lithuania); Joniškis (Lithuania); Jūrmala (Latvia)

For more information, visit the Laurea project page or the official AURORA project website.

More information: